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The Road by Cormac McCarthy recently won the Pulitzer for fiction. I read it earlier this month and couldn’t put it down after starting it. It’s a chilling and suspenseful book.

“Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it’s not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that’s the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy’s previous work.”

I don’t want to give away anymore of the story, but I highly recommend reading it!

Last year, the only books I read where business books. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the only things I’m reading these days are blogs, magazines and online newspapers. I’m pretty well informed on most topics, but there’s something special about reading a really good book.

I love finding a book that completely captivates me. One that I can’t stop reading at 3:00 AM or one that I don’t want to end. Some books that I put in this “captivating” category were Blindness by Jose Saramago, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

So for 2007, one of my resolutions is to read more books that aren’t business or work related. Looking for good books to read, I found last year’s major book award winners and listed them below.

2006 Man Booker Prize - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - “Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard , was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep.”

2006 National Book Award Winners:

• Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - “On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor.”

• Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan - “The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage.”

• Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey - “Published in installments across several decades, Mackey’s two epic series—one called Mu, the other Song of the Andoumboulou—bring the attitudes of free jazz and the reverberating patterns of West African ensemble music to the goals of the American encyclopedic long poem à la Charles Olson. The mysterious, even hermetic, new verse extends both of Mackey’s epics, even (as his prose foreword explains) merging them, so that they form one enormous text describing a mystical quest.”

• Young People’s Literature: The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1) by M.T. Anderson - “Set against the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson’s extraordinary novel takes place at a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim.”

2006 Pulitzer Prize:

• Fiction: March by Geraldine Brooks - “In the classic American novel LITTLE WOMEN, the father is more of a presence than a character. He’s serving in the Union Army at the beginning and comes home to recuperate from illness later on. Author Geraldine Brooks has taken the patriarch of the March family and spun an entire story. It is set in the Civil War, and flashbacks help flesh out the back story of his philosophical growth.”

• Nonfiction: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins - “Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words “Mau Mau” still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya’s Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning .”

• Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - “delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products.”

• History: Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky - “All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines–and beyond.”

• Poetry: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson - “a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems.”

I’m actually going to start with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to me by my significant other who recently read the book. She told me it was a great book about “a journey of a man and his son in a postapocalyptic setting.” It’s also a short read to get me back into the book reading habit. I hope I can put it in the “captivating” category!